First, the Prime Minister said that the contracts of temporary employees hired during the UBP congress period would not be renewed. Then Deputy Prime Minister Serdar Denktaş said his conscience would not allow it. Then the UBP faction issued a statement saying it would react very strongly if the temporary employees were dismissed. So, what are we going to do with these jobs?
I think it would be useful to discuss the facts and the question of fairness, rather than who said what. We can describe the appointments made during the UBP congress period as follows: Some people, out of concern for their own positions, are giving other people money from your pockets as if it were their own. With this logic, +363 people were hired in this country for the sake of the congress. We do not know exactly what other state resources were provided. I hope the government will look into this and present the findings to us. But considering the issue only in financial terms would prevent us from seeing the social chaos it has caused. If we go back to those days, we can recall the debates by making a bit of an effort to remember. Back then, we were trying to find out how many people had been hired. The Toparlanıyoruz movement played a pioneering role in this regard and sought to establish the official number of appointments. There was debate over whether the appointments were legal. Now we have reached the point of asking what to do with the appointments that were made!
If we consider the human side of the issue, we are confronted with the fact that dismissal is unpleasant and that the people in question will be left unemployed. But there is another fact: how those job opportunities were obtained, and how far the bounds of fairness were overstepped! We can illustrate this as follows: Imagine two families. The first invests all its savings in its child’s education and future. The second uses its savings to build political connections. One day, a job opportunity comes up, and the first family’s child has the education best suited to the job. But suitability is not the criterion; thanks to political connections, the second family’s child gets the job. The child from the first family, left facing this situation, is forced to emigrate. And then we sit and wonder, “Why are our young people leaving our country?”…
We, who have grown accustomed to the starkest examples of political decay, still stand by and watch these things happen. So, how long can this go on? Aren’t LTB and KTHY enough? The 363 people I’m talking about may be angry with me right now, but I want to remind them that we cannot find the truth unless we talk about the facts, and that we are all in the same boat. Of course, we should remember that we are talking specifically about these 363 people, and more generally about all appointments made according to the same logic.
The truth is that the most important thing politicians should take care to do is avoid injustice in society. But this case makes it abundantly clear that our politicians have failed. Then again, if we consider that we are talking about a system that charges those who pay their electricity bills 30% more to cover the bills of those who do not, this is only natural… Anyway, returning to our subject, the question “What should we do now?” can help set our course…
We all know very well that appointments in our country are not made on the basis of knowledge, qualifications, and experience. The usual criteria are party membership and the potential to bring in votes! The only thing to do at this point is take the power to make appointments away from politicians. We need to establish an independent, strong, and transparent body that will never treat people unfairly. This body would be responsible for all appointments to the state and ensure that they are made on the basis of knowledge, qualifications, and experience. We already have such an institution (the Public Service Commission), but during the previous government’s term, the Prime Minister himself accused it, and unfortunately it became the subject of controversy. For this reason, we must learn from our mistakes and immediately establish an institution with the characteristics I have described above.
I know very well that it will be difficult to take away from politicians the promise of jobs and the power to make appointments—important tools for getting elected to parliament in our country. Our current political mindset will, of course, resist this.
But enough is enough.